


father figure

by windupclock



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen, Hakoda (Avatar) is a Good Parent, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Toph Beifong and Zuko are Siblings, hints of sokka/zuko but it's very subtle. mild flavored
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:27:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27109507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windupclock/pseuds/windupclock
Summary: Zuko really isn't good with fathers.(or: after they get back from the Boiling Rock, Zuko has a panic attack, bonds with Toph over trauma, and talks to Hakoda, in that order.)
Relationships: Hakoda & Zuko (Avatar), Toph Beifong & Zuko
Comments: 14
Kudos: 601





	father figure

**Author's Note:**

> yeehaw! i wanted to be mean to zuko and this is what happened.
> 
> **trigger warnings:** depiction of a panic attack and some self-loathing thoughts, discussion of child abuse (both physical and emotional) and the aftermath thereof, a brief flashback to the agni kai

Through sheer force of will, Zuko manages to keep his stupid, haywire brain under control until they get back to the temple. He stands at the railing of the airship, gripping the metal until his knuckles go white, and stares down at the water beneath them. He takes deep breaths the way Uncle Iroh taught him, and then he hears Hakoda’s deep voice and fear shoots up his spine again. His eyes sting with tears and he squeezes them shut.

The voices of the others are a low hum in the background, and Zuko can only really pick them apart by pitch—the rush of the air only dampens his hearing further, and his back is turned to them, so he can’t look to their lips for clues as to what they’re saying. Hakoda doesn’t sound angry, but Zuko isn’t stupid. Zuko knows all too well that mixing venom with honey doesn’t dilute it one bit. Cruel people can act kind. Fathers can act kind.

His father was never very good at that, in retrospect, but he played the role well enough to fool Zuko.

Zuko isn’t sure why—doesn’t want to admit the reason, even to himself—but he doesn’t want Sokka to be fooled. He doesn’t want Sokka to be hurt.

_Don’t punish him_ , he thinks, grip tightening on the rail. _Please, it wasn’t his fault you were—don’t take it out on him, don’t be mad at him, you can hurt me if you need to, it’s my fault anyway—_

The sounds from behind him shift. Zuko opens his eyes. They’re back at the temple.

* * *

Zuko doesn’t realize he’s trembling until he sets foot on solid ground again. The rest of the group gather around them, but Toph doesn’t seem to care about the reunions. She’s looking in Zuko’s direction with a frown on her little face, and Zuko feels his panic growing— _stop showing your weakness_ , he scolds himself. _You have to be useful. If you aren’t, if they don’t need you, they’ll—_

Toph walks over to him, her frown deepening. “You okay, Sparky?” she asks, and she sounds genuinely concerned.

“I—” Zuko tries to say _I’m fine_ , but the words won’t come out, sticking stubbornly in his throat, his voice echoing it when he tries again: “I—I—”

“Something’s wrong with Zuko,” Toph says, and now she’s halfway to frantic, and Zuko doesn’t know why she’s so worked up.

He hears footsteps and looks around to see Sokka approaching him, concern written across his face, and Hakoda’s at his side, and Katara is looking at him with confusion a few steps behind them, and Zuko wants to snap at them, at anything, but his voice won’t _work_.

“Zuko?” Sokka’s voice is gentle. “What’s going on?”

“Are you okay, son?” Hakoda asks, and he reaches a broad hand out towards Zuko, and Zuko can’t breathe and he can’t see, and the world shifts until he’s on his knees again, and the hand is his father’s, and he can smell the ozone in the air, hear the skin underneath his father’s hand sizzle, feel it blister and bubble, and—

Zuko needs to get away, and he knows it’s selfish, he knows he shouldn’t leave them alone and unprotected, but he can’t control the panic that wells through him. “Get away from me!” he yells, the words ripping out of his throat, and he’s scrambling back across the rocks and then turning and running, no plan for where he’s going, blocking everything from his mind except the stone under his feet and the ache in his chest.

* * *

He collapses in an empty hall when he can’t run any longer. He should have gotten farther, he knows, but he’s exhausted and his chest hurts and he still can’t breathe—

_Making excuses for yourself again, Prince Zuko?_ sneers his father’s voice inside his head, and Zuko shakes his head like he can dislodge it.

“You don’t have power over me anymore,” he mumbles, and he knows it’s a lie as he says it—if his father didn’t have the power, if Zuko were the stronger one, he wouldn’t be here, would he? He wouldn’t be curled up on the floor shaking like a leaf. He wouldn’t be an embarrassment.

He’s too wrapped up in his own head to even hear the footsteps before Toph’s feet appear in front of him. She crouches down, pressing one palm against the ground, and then sits gingerly in front of him. “Did… did Hakoda do something to you?” Toph asks. He’s never heard her voice sound so soft, so small, but it hardens as she continues: “If he did, I’ll kick his ass into next year. You just say the word, Sparky.”

Zuko tries to laugh, but all that comes out is a wheeze. “No,” he says, rough-edged. “He didn’t. Hurt me.” He shuts his eyes again. “I just—his hand. His hand, it—” He can’t say the words. He shakes his head. “I don’t want Sokka to get hurt,” he says in a rush.

Toph blinks. “Why would Sokka get hurt?”

“Because Hakoda was imprisoned?” Toph frowns, and he rushes to clarify. “Not that—I know it wasn’t Sokka’s fault, but his father might not feel the same way, and I didn’t—I don’t want him to get punished.”

Toph draws in a sharp breath, her eyes big and round. “Uh. You think… you thought Hakoda was going to hurt Sokka? Because he got arrested?”

“Yes?” Zuko doesn’t understand how she can be so naive—she’s twelve, her face is small and her cheeks are round with baby fat, and she’s almost the age he was when his father—

“Can I hug you?” Toph blurts out.

Zuko blinks at her. “Can you what?”

“Give you a hug. You know, I put my arms around you, you put your arms around me, we squeeze a little? A hug?” She raises an eyebrow. “What, do they not hug in the Fire Nation?”

“Not really in my family,” Zuko says before he thinks better of it, and Toph’s face crumples. He reaches out to her instinctively, puts a tentative hand on her shoulder, and that’s apparently all the incentive she needs to wrap herself around him and cling, tucking her face against Zuko’s neck, her hands clutching hard at the back of his tunic.

For a while, neither of them move. She’s surprisingly solid, for such a little thing, and the pressure of her against him is comforting.

Eventually, Toph draws back and wipes the back of her hand hard across her eyes. “Zuko,” she says carefully. “I’m not, like, an expert in healthy family dynamics, but you gotta listen to me, okay? Hakoda would _never_ hurt his kids. Either of them. He’s not mad at Sokka for getting arrested, and even if he was mad, he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t hurt his son.” Her insistence borders on desperation. “Zuko, normal parents don’t hurt their children. They _don’t_.”

“I don’t understand,” Zuko says after a moment. “I don’t—never? But what—what if they do something wrong? What if they need to be punished?”

“ _Mud and dust_ ,” Toph mutters. “What the _shit_ was your childhood like?”

Zuko stares at her for a moment. “Is—is that not normal? That’s how it was in my family. Well,” he considers, “not so much with—with my mother, I guess, and not really with Uncle, but… I mean, my father disciplined me when I was out of line, and so did my tutors.” He shrugs, uncomfortable under the weight of the conversation. “That’s how it always was.”

“Well, that’s not how it should be!” Toph snaps. “That’s fucked up!”

“Oh,” Zuko says. “Huh. Well.”

“ _Well_ ,” Toph spits out—clearly angry, but not angry at Zuko, he doesn’t think. “I need you to remember that, okay? It’s _not_ normal. It’s wrong, and you deserve better.”

The words sound rehearsed somehow, familiar on Toph’s tongue in a way that reminds Zuko of how he whispered _it was cruel and it was wrong_ to himself over and over again to convince himself it was true. Zuko squints at her, and he starts to see her in a new light. 

Katara has mentioned her and Sokka’s mother a few times, and Zuko just helped rescue their father from a prison break. Any parental figure Aang had has been gone for a century now, but Zuko remembers the kid telling him stories about one monk in particular on the way back from their field trip. But Toph… Toph has never mentioned her parents, in the time Zuko has known her—which, granted, hasn’t been very long, but shouldn’t Toph miss them? Why is she even here? She’s _twelve_. She’s not old enough to fight a war. (None of them are.) She’s not old enough to be on her own.

“Toph,” Zuko says as gently as he can, “are you… what was _your_ childhood like?”

Toph bristles for a moment, then slumps down, her face going blank and dismal. “It was—I don’t know. Not great? Not happy. My parents didn’t—they never hurt me, but they didn’t _know_ me. They never saw me, they just saw this… this fragile little girl who had to be kept safe because she was blind and helpless and it didn’t matter what I did or how many times I told them I wasn’t helpless, they never _heard_ me and they didn’t _care_. They didn’t—no one even knew I existed, in my town, and I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean no one knew my parents had a daughter because I was never allowed to leave the estate.”

“Fuck,” Zuko says, feeling grief and anger swell in his stomach. He hates how _hurt_ Toph sounds. He wants to make the wound better, but he knows from experience that he can’t. “That’s—that sounds bad.” He hesitantly wraps an arm around Toph, and she melts into the touch, leaning against him with her head on his shoulder.

“It sucked,” Toph says simply. “But I’m not there anymore, am I? I have a new family now, and—and they know that I’m not helpless but sometimes I need help and that’s okay, that doesn’t make me weak. And _I_ know that now, too. So. That’s what matters.”

Zuko smiles and tucks a strand of hair back behind her ear. “That’s good,” he says softly. “I’m glad you know that. And I’m glad they know that.”

Toph’s face twists in confusion for a moment. “ _We_ ,” she corrects.

“What?”

“You said _they_ know that, like you aren’t part of my family now.” She pokes him in the stomach. “You’re not getting away that easily.”

“Oh,” Zuko says softly. “I didn’t—”

“And it goes both ways,” Toph says sharply. “We’re _your_ family too, so you—you have to talk to us, and you have to know that nobody is going to punish you, and if they do I’ll beat them up, okay? And you have to let me hug you sometimes. Those are the rules.”

“I think I can agree to those terms.”

* * *

Toph clings to him on the way back—not riding on his back because her feet are burnt or holding onto his elbow to help navigate, but holding his hand and swinging it between them. There’s no purpose in the touch, only comfort and connection. Zuko holds her hand tight. She doesn’t let go when they get back to their makeshift campsite on the temple floor to find the others, Hakoda included, engrossed in conversation. They look up at Toph and Zuko’s approach, and Sokka smiles.

“We were worried about you,” Aang says, tilting his head quizzically. “Are you okay?”

Zuko nods. “I’m fine.”

“Fine, or _fine_ -fine?” Aang presses.

“I don’t—what’s the difference?”

“One of them means you’re actually fine, and the other one means you aren’t really fine but you say you are because you don’t want to talk about how you actually are.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Zuko snaps, then clears his throat awkwardly. “Um, H—Chief Hakoda, sir? Could I, um, have a word with you?”

Chief Hakoda shoots a brief bemused look at his son before he turns to Zuko and nods. “Of course.”

* * *

When they’re standing out of earshot, Zuko shuts his eyes for a second and focuses on his breathing, keeping his exhales longer than his inhales, feeling his inner flame rise and fall with each breath. When he opens his eyes again, the Chief is still standing there, now with a puzzled look on his face.

“Sorry,” Zuko blurts. “I mean, sorry for that just then, but also, um, sorry for earlier. I didn’t—I shouldn’t have—”

The Chief shakes his head, and the flash of panic must show on Zuko’s face, because Hakoda hurries to continue: “There’s nothing to apologize for, Zuko. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I yelled at you,” Zuko says, then wants to slap himself for saying. Why would he _tell him_ what he did wrong?

Hakoda only chuckles. “Trust me, kid, I’ve heard worse.” His face grows somber. “I, uh. I heard a bit of your story from Sokka. No details,” he hastens to add, “but he told me that your… that you might have some issues related to fathers in particular.”

Zuko winces. “You… could say that?”

Hakoda nods. “I… I don’t know what to say,” he admits. “I haven’t had the, ah, privilege of meeting the Fire Lord myself, but from what I’ve heard—”

“He’s an imperialist piece of shit who needs to be deposed and hopefully killed immediately so he can’t hurt anyone else?” Zuko raises his eyebrow. “Yeah, I agree.”

“I was going to say it couldn’t have been easy growing up with him as a father, but that works too.”

Zuko hesitates, then nods. “It, uh. It wasn’t.”

“Look, I understand if you need… space, or anything else. It can’t be easy, if I remind you of—of him, and if you need me to not be around you I can work with that, but—Zuko, I need you to know that you don’t have to protect my children from me.” He looks Zuko right in the eye. Blue eyes, not gold. “Sokka and Katara are my world. I love them more than anything, and I would rather die than ever intentionally hurt either of them.”

“No offense,” Zuko says quietly, “but you’ll have my trust on that when you’ve earned it.”

“None taken,” Hakoda says. He smiles. “Thank you for giving me the chance to earn it, and… thank you for rescuing me, kid. I don’t think I said that before, but you didn’t let my son go alone, and that means a lot.”

“He was going to get himself killed,” Zuko says, squirming a little under Hakoda’s steady gaze. “I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

“Well, I appreciate that.” Hakoda’s expression is warm. It’s starkly unfamiliar. “I’m glad my kids have someone like you looking out for them now.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! feel free to follow me on tumblr at [gays4korra](http://gays4korra.tumblr.com) <3


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